The Darkness Followed
by procrastin8or951
Summary: "Hell is forgetting yourself and Heaven is only remembering, but all Dean needs is to stop. Never to be what he isn't, but not to be what he is. He just needs to stop." Warnings for suicidal ideation. Not a deathfic.


The Darkness Followed

It's one of those mornings that could be any morning, waking up before Sammy and having a minute to lay in bed like the world paused just for him. He wakes up tired, but it's a one-cup kind of tired rather than the whole-pot kind of mornings he's been having. It's not hot or cold, bright or dark, and it's another no-name motel that could be nowhere just as easily as it could be anywhere. So he stretches and it hurts, hurts like days-old bruises, a couple of ribs that aren't quite healed, hurts like good work done well. And he pauses, listens to Sam breathe, like ocean waves, falling rain, like the world still turning. Then Sam snorts a little and rolls over, and Dean grins like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard instead of the same thing he hears every morning as Sam wakes up.

He feels the smile stretch his face at this, the tiniest of things, and the smile falls right back down when he thinks how unfamiliar it feels to be so happy. That it took so little to get here, and that the world so infrequently reached the threshold of his smile.

-SPN-

"Where do you think they go?" Dean says, kneeling next to the burning grave, leaning in like he might meld with the fire.

Sam looks at him askance, reaches like he wants to pull Dean back from the edge, but he hesitates like he knows the edge of the grave isn't the one he should worry about. "What?"

"People ask us all the time," Dean murmurs, staring at the flames licking the bones, remembers the sweet scent of his own boiling blood. He clears his throat. "You always say some comforting shit to make them feel better, but what do you really think?"

Sam is quiet for a minute, and Dean very carefully doesn't look at him. After a minute, Sam folds all those long limbs and sits next to Dean, at the foot of the grave. "Heaven?"

"Or Hell," Dean affirms. He tugs some grass up by the roots, doesn't know what to do with it once he has it, so he sacrifices more life to fire and wonders abstractly whether fire ever pays it forward.

"Maybe," Sam concedes, and Dean looks over at him, eyes glowing demon-dark in the flickering light.

Hell is forgetting yourself and Heaven is only remembering, but all Dean needs is to stop. Never to be what he isn't, but not to be what he is. He just needs to stop.

"We need to go," Sam says, so Dean gets to his feet, sacrifices a little more to the fire and sends a few strands to the sky just in case, and then he keeps walking.

-SPN-

He's always known how hunters end. Blade of a knife, barrel of a gun, claws of a demon, scorch of a fire. He can only scarcely remember a time when the world was more monster toys than monsters in the flesh, but even then, everything died with crashing explosions and painful last words, repeated on an endless loop, one end after another after every other.

Dean has always been like this.

It's why he doesn't remember exactly when he first thought he would die.

He must've been young, because Sammy didn't yet know why Dean kept a knife under his pillow, thought it was a game and he wanted to play too. Dean gave him the dullest butter knife he could find, rusted and worn smooth, and Sam had pouted until Dean said that rust was the blood from dragons, and look at how many this knife must've slain, how he wished he could have a knife like that under his pillow but he was stuck with this old plain one. Sam had been thrilled, gone to sleep with one thumb in his mouth, the other hand curled around the knife under his pillow, just the way Dean always had. And Dean lay awake and thought that someday it might only be Sam, so the next day he showed Sam how to lay salt lines, how to draw the protective sigils, made him practice over and over again. Because someday he would need to do it without his big brother.

Dean doesn't remember when he first thought he might not die in valiant battle.

It wasn't the kind of jarring, epiphanic moment he wanted it to be. It was just a little half-formed phrase between considering turning off the highway for gas or going straight through to the next town. That he could also veer halfway in between and hit the root of that bridge. It was half a joke, because he honestly couldn't make up his mind between the exit or not, but it half wasn't and he knew it. So he exited to bypass the bridge, filled the gas tank and picked up a cup of coffee while he was at it. And then he drove a service road for three miles down the side of the highway until the next on-ramp so he wouldn't have to pass that bridge, wouldn't have to decide all over again.

He didn't think about it again.

Until he did.

-SPN-

Dean sees a lot of people die. He sees even more people already dead.

He may have seen more dead people than live ones at this point.

Almost everyone he ever knew personally is dead. He's looked up some statistics on the laptop while Sam is in the shower, and of the people they saved, probably a good number of them are dead too. Car wrecks and plane crashes and cardiovascular disease, cancer and freak accidents and murder. Suicide.

He's been kind of ranking the deaths he sees lately. Not in any kind of purposeful way, but some are clearly more painful than others. Some are clearly not that feasible either, like getting a werewolf to rip out your heart. How do you even find someone to do that for you, Craigslist? The people Dean runs into must have spectacularly bad luck to actually run into these things, because he's been walking around for thirty odd years now and the only times he gets close to dying are when he throws himself headlong right at it.

It's not that he's making a plan or anything. It's just something to think about. That some of these things hurt, that some of them leave more for the family to deal with.

Dean has seen so many people die though. He can't quite remember the ranking anymore, so he has to write it down. It's on one of those long grocery story receipts with five discounts and add-ons after each item and forty-two coupons at the end so it's a pretty long receipt. It's not an organized thing by any means – there are arrows and extra lines squeezed in here and there where he wanted to put "eaten by carnivorous plant" below "drained by a vampire" but above "drawn and quartered."

It doesn't escape him that the neatest deaths are at the top. The ones where the body is relatively intact, where the family could have an open-casket, where hunters wouldn't have to traipse all over God's green earth to find that last hair tying a soul to physicality. Where the body could be neatly picked up and placed on a pyre to be purified by fire.

He just thinks someone should remember these people, and how else but to write it down? This is a list of the ways people have died. It is not a list of the ways a person could die.

Dean keeps his list folded up, tucked under the lining of one boot. Because even though it isn't supposed to be a list of all the ways he might choose to die, he knows it certainly could be.

-SPN-

Sam hasn't smiled in so long, Dean barely remembers what it looks like.

He has this picture, under the driver's seat of the Impala, next to his picture of Mom and the picture of him and Sam by a lake with Dad, in this plain white envelope that he taped to the underside of the bench. He can't remember who took the picture or what the hell they were doing, but Sam has this huge smile, white teeth, laugh lines bracketing his mouth. And Dean is just to the side, his own smile just taking hold, because he's looking at Sam, and Sam is so happy, and that's all Dean ever wanted anyway.

But the Sam in the picture has hair only just down to his collar, still has bangs and shirts that are just a little too short so the waistband of his boxers shows over his jeans, because he had just gone through another growth spurt and hadn't figured out how to buy clothes in a size that was long enough for his torso but wasn't too big for his shoulders. He was maybe 23, at the most, and it was the last smile Dean could really remember.

He hands Sam the keys outside of Omaha, because even though Dean isn't happy that much, it happens most frequently when he is driving. Maybe that is all Sam needs.

But Sam just shrugs and takes the keys, asks if Dean is tired or something, folds himself into the driver's seat without waiting for an answer.

All the way to Enid, Oklahoma, Dean tells the funniest, dirtiest stories he can remember, forces his voice to be a little faster than he usually speaks these days, a little more awake, and he hopes it is enough.

Sam gives him that closed-lipped, crooked grin that he does now instead of a smile, once in a while a little glimmer of teeth showing through when he huffs out a single chuckle, but it isn't the smile from the picture, isn't the belly-laugh Dean needs to hear.

At their motel, Dean looks up the funniest videos he can remember on Sam's laptop, forces his brother to watch them, watches as Sam chuckles and snorts but doesn't fucking _laugh_. Sam keeps catching him staring, tugging his half-smile up a notch when he sees Dean looking.

Dean catches sight of his own smile in the reflection of the laptop screen where it is dark between scenes, tight and fake and uncomfortable. A mirror of Sam's. He wonders if Sam's smile is unfamiliar and uncomfortable for the same reasons Dean's is, and then he walks out of the motel room without a word, finds a bar, and gets so shitfaced he can't find his way back.

Sam half-carries him up the block, Dean's brain sloshing between his ears as he mumbles "just one more, Sammy, just need to see it one more time." And Sam practically pours him into bed, tugs off his boots and tucks him in, but he doesn't smile. Not while Dean tells him about the pictures, not while Dean tells Sam about the butter knife with dragon's rust on it, not while Dean says that you shouldn't have to choose between heaven or hell because there ought to be the root of a bridge in between, someplace where you can just stop.

He still isn't smiling in the morning, when he packs Dean and his enormous hangover into the car, drives them straight to South Dakota, ignoring the Enid ghost and the hunt and all of Dean's jokes about the stupid things we say when we're drunk, never makes any sense, right Sammy, right?

-SPN-

He slices his hand open on the bumper of a car. Accidentally.

The car's hood was crumpled, the bumper jagged on one edge.

He grabs where he knows it is sharp, because that's where he knows it is broken.

Rust-coloured spots spatter the dustbowl of Bobby's salvage yard and Dean thinks of all the men this earth must have killed. All the men who bled and died on the dust of this world.

He cuts his arm three times on the same piece of bumper. The blood on his hand makes the hot metal too slick, his hand sliding across it as he pulls, the sharp edge of it digging roughly into the soft underside of his arm. He tugs on it again anyway, it's supposed to move, damn it, so he can plaster something new over it, shiny and perfect. It's supposed to move so he can throw away the old, broken one, beat down the jagged edges until it is just a perfect cube of useless metal, ready to be melted down and made into something better.

The sun beats down, dry and yellow and revealing, heating the metal under his hands until the sweet scent of boiling blood and the burn of sweat in an open wound brings him back to himself. He kicks at the blood-streaked chrome, then flops down on his back and wriggles under, snaking his good hand under the corner of the metal because he must have missed something, some stupid little thing holding it there, something he couldn't see that wouldn't let it go in peace.

"Dean?" Bobby nudges at his boot.

"I just gotta find…" Dean says, feels three drops of blood land on his lower eyelid.

"How 'bout you come out here first." It's not a question, even though he phrased it that way.

"Something is holding this thing here, I just gotta get it." Dean's bloodied the knuckles on his good hand digging around here and he still can't find it.

"Maybe it's supposed to be there," Bobby says.

So Dean plants his feet on the dust to pull himself out, and he realized abruptly that there is no flat, square little lump under the lining of his boot.

He stumbles to his feet, head swimming a little with realization and blood loss. He puts one hand to his face, rubs bloody knuckles across his forehead before pressing his palm to his eye, blinking against the black dots covering his vision.

Dean feels Bobby's hand between his shoulder blades, guiding him, the other holding gently to his arm, between the gashes, just gently holding his arm away from him like it is worse off for being associated with him.

"Shit, Dean, what did you do?" Sam's pulling him to the kitchen, pressing him into a chair, pushing his head between his knees. A cool cloth lands on the back of his neck and Dean shivers, watches the black spots fade to red, his arm dripping blood onto the floor of Bobby's kitchen.

Bobby cleans up his cuts, wraps his arm and hand in white gauze, tapes it down to stay like it needs to be permanent. He covers the knuckles of the other hand with Batman Band-Aids, grunts something about not needing Band-Aids since they were kids and this is all he's got.

Sam wipes the sweat and dirt and grease from his face and neck, tells him "you got a sunburn, you stupid jerk, you know how bad you burn" like skin cancer is a real concern here.

Dean sits still and doesn't really do anything but let them patch together the façade.

He sees his list sitting on Bobby's kitchen table, the edge of it soggy where the condensation from a glass of whiskey has soaked through. He looks closer and sees a flash of red, where he circled the number two method a few nights ago.

He didn't deserve the number one way. Not if he was going to make it happen.

He can see where he made a list in the margin, too, in the obnoxious turquoise ink of a pen Sam had accidentally stolen from a Biggerson's, feels briefly ashamed that his list of things he needed to do one more time are written in gel pen like he's a thirteen-year-old girl.

It's just that he hadn't thought anyone would see, hadn't thought anyone would ever know that all he wanted was one more burger, one more slice of pie, to hear Ramble On one last time, and to see Sam smile, to hear one real laugh.

He wonders if Sam knows how many bridges and overpasses they passed while Dean waited for that goddamn smile.

Sam catches Dean looking at the list, deliberately steps between Dean and the paper. He clears his throat and it sounds like a well of tears has built up there, and when he's opening his mouth to speak, Dean's afraid the dam will burst.

"That isn't," Dean cuts in flatly. "It's not what you're thinking it is. Just so you know."

Sam doesn't look like he believes him, but he nods vigorously, like he's reinforcing good behavior. "Yeah, Dean. It's just. You know, I was looking at it, and…that's a lot of hunts we've been on, right? A lot of people. I just thought…maybe we need a break, you know?"

Dean doesn't say anything because it's very clear to him that this is not an optional break.

"Bobby said he could use some help fixing some cars. He needs you to stick around. Right, Bobby?" Sam's voice is high and forced and desperate. Dean sort of wants to pat him on the back or punch him in the shoulder or hug him or something, but he's sitting down and Sam is standing up, and at this moment, the distance is insurmountable.

He rolls his gaze over to Bobby, who is leaning against the doorjamb, just watching him from under that trucker's cap, arms crossed over his chest. This man who is like a father to him, the only person who was brought to tears when Dean made his deal, the only person who ever saw something worthy in him and Dean wants to disappear under his gaze because he knows that Bobby must know that there was nothing worthy in Dean at all.

"We really could use you around here," Bobby says, finally. "Wouldn't feel right doing it without you."

"I'm not sure," Dean began, but Bobby cut him off.

"Well, I am," he said with finality. "You're exactly what we need around here, so you'd best plan on being here a while."

Sam is stroking his fingers through Dean's hair, he realizes abruptly. His little brother is standing there, brushing his hand through Dean's sweaty hair over and over again like he needs some sort of physical reminder that Dean is sitting here. Like the fact that he is here trumps that he is sweaty and there's also grease in his hair, that he's shaking a little where he sits for no good reason. Like Sam is trying to really be here because he now knows Dean was going to leave.

"Bobby?" Dean asks, abruptly. "What happened to that car? The one I was working on?

Bobby clears his throat, pushes off the doorjamb to stand straighter, drops his arms to his sides. He looks at Sam for a minute, then back to Dean. "It crashed into the support for a bridge."

Dean thinks about the shrill squeal of breaks, the burning of tires, metal screaming and rending, the engine collapsing, oil igniting, the sick crunch of flesh and bone against the steering column, of blood dripping, the sweet scent of it boiling over explosive gasoline. But it wasn't that way.

The car's hood was crumpled, the bumper jagged on one edge. The driver's seat was intact, the windshield smooth and perfect.

"Couldn't get the bumper off," he says. "There was something holding it on. Something I couldn't see."

"I guess it wasn't as broken as you thought," Bobby replies.

"And uh, what are we doing with it?" Dean asks carefully.

"Just gotta tune up a couple parts. We'll give it back, good as new."

"They want it back?" Dean asks, surprised. This car hit a bridge. It's broken, all bent out of shape. It's got a laundry list of problems. They could have let it be forged by fire into something else entirely. They could have let it be someone else's car with only memories of what used to be.

"Maybe they need it more than you realized," Sam says, and Dean turns to look up at him.

Hell is forgetting yourself and Heaven is only remembering, but sometimes all he needs is to stop. Never to be what he isn't, but not to be what he is. He just needs to stop, right in between.

"So we could really use your help," Sam says. He shakes Dean's shoulder a little like he wants Dean to wake up, to open his eyes and see something right this moment. So he does.

"Okay," Dean says, and Bobby pats him on the back. Dean looks to Sam, sees the corner of Sam's mouth tug up like he might smile but he doesn't, in case that was one of Dean's "one last."

But Sam nods and says "Okay then," and, at least for this second, it is.

End.


End file.
